Nanatsu no Taizai: Imashime no Fukkatsu – 04

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times: King is one of my sneaky favorites of this series. Though he’s a member of the so-far unstoppable Seven Deadly Sins, he comes off as a comparative underdog, since he struggles and scrapes and seemingly has magic more useful for wiping out mooks or utility, like Merlin with a power downgrade and none of her stone-cold assurance. It reminds me in a way of Thor Ragnarok, King is a character that should be transcendent but is made human relateable by his foibles, and because he’s outclassed by his companions.

Here, King was placed in a situation that’s illustrative for how you make characters like the Seven Deadly Sins work. You’ve got super powerful main character? Cool. Give them even more powerful enemies. That’s the problem with shows like Mahouka, it’s not that the main character is strong, it’s that he’s never appreciably challenged (except for by social institutions, which is hella frustrating). Here, the main characters are both strong and constantly challenged. Like I said in my preview, it’s like playing with action figures and making Superman fight Goku—only this time it’s, I don’t know, Booster Gold, and it doesn’t look like he’s got a shot at winning.

I’m happy that Ban didn’t get a chance to help. Not because I don’t like Ban—I’m always down to see Ban mix it up—but because it would have clouded the matter of King as a greedy ruler, who wants to protect his forest, his people, and Diane no matter what. I also really liked how, in addition to those others, King makes it clear in his little speech that Ban is one of the people he cherishes. Despite everything Ban is, he’s precious to King, because he recognizes who he truly is, and the love he holds for his sister. They really do come off as brothers-in-laws, they don’t exactly get along but they do value one another.

I also have no complaints about the shounen power up that leads to King’s victory. Like I’ve said before, this is very much a shounen series, and it embraces that fact. It just uses te tropes well. Of more concern to me is the ridiculous disparity between the Ten Commandment who’s shown up—Galand (Iwasaki Hiroshi), at 26,000—and the Sins. As I suspected, it really mucks things up. The battles against the Albions worked great without laying down numbers, and even mentioning that King’s power spiked to double that of his Albion was fine. Now it seems unreasonable that the Sins would have any shot whatsoever (outside of maybe Meliodas’ Full Counter), which could have been achieved without bringing math into it. Still, we’ll see how it goes. While I still think explicit power levels are a shitty idea, I’m sure it’ll be fine in the end.

Random thoughts:

A fun game: see how many of the main cast’s seiyuu you can pick out voicing all the random fairies.

Does the power level stuff go away eventually?. Because I agree is pointless, annoying and unnecesary. Some feats of what the enemies can do would work so much better to stablish them as threats than simple power levels

This reminds of early episodes of Bleach, (below 150) when lonely Menos would invade, walk about shooting ceros, Ichigo would hurry up to the commotion, gets beat, then some captains come over and deal with Menons, next episode he then deals with one himself xD

Well I like the anime and the characters but all of those new shounen tropes in this season throw me off.
In the first season Hendrikson is like the ultimate badass and wipes the floor with them and now he seems like a footsoldier to those ten commandments. They couldn’t even beat Hendrikson when they all fought together… And he’s now retreating and want to warn them? He who made everything kinda possible? What’s with this side-switching?

Now they all get power-ups from pretty wierd places. Effectivly saying that King wasn’t really putting effort into defeating Hendrikson or what was the message in this episode and his sacred treasure release?

And those damn powerlevels, that’s like totally unnecessary. Is this just to give Hawk at least something to do? As someone already mentioned Bleach. There “powerlevels” were handed waaay better than this number thing which already didn’t really work out in DBZ as those numbers became too inflated.

Sorry for the rant :/. I’m just a bit dissapointed with the show currently.

Hendrickson switching (back) sides doesn’t bother me. They didn’t do a phenomenal job of explaining that he was basically brainwashed by Dreyfus, but it came across in the end. This is the real Hendrickson, and it gives the good guys a much needed ally in the fight. If they decide to trust him.

I’m less fond of how clearly outmatched he is in the face of seemingly any of the Ten Commandments, as noted. Goes back to that power level/power creep thing.

I don’t think King wasn’t trying vs Hendrickson. It’s more that it seemed like a risky move, and only something he approached when everything was on the line—though the lack of time between the previous arc and this one hampers somewhat here, since, with some kind of timeskip, that could have been a new technique they learned. Here it does provide some fridge logic.

Still, the character stuff is all still being done well, so I’m happy enough, even if I totally agree on the power levels stuff.

As a manga reader, I’ll just say this: I found what happens next to be downright infuriating. Nakaba could’ve advanced the story arc in so many other ways than he did, and they would all have been better than what will probably happen next episode. Don’t get me wrong, I like where the story went, but there are so many better ways to write in the vehicle to drive the story.

Sidenote: It’s been like 15 years since I last used HTML. The IMG tag doesn’t work, so how do I embed a thumbnail like the two users above?

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